An effective goal and incentive plan is essential to the success of any financial institution’s overall sales strategy. In a survey of US bankers, 84% of respondents who currently have an employee incentive plan in place said their incentive plan has increased sales within their organization and increased employee engagement by encouraging better profiling, cross-selling, and referrals to other lines of business.
With more and more banks realizing the value of incentive plans, you might be wondering how to get started with tracking results and driving change within your own organization. Here are four key steps toward adopting and implementing an effective incentive system.
1. Choose the Right Plan
Rewarding appropriate incentives for the right behavior is a proven way to motivate your sales team and see real results. With the right incentive plan, you can steer your institution toward growing core deposits, retaining your most profitable customers, promoting the cross-selling of the right services to the right customer and creating team unity. As you’re building a plan for your organization, it’s important to make sure incentives match profitable products (or lines of business) and align with your current and long-term business goals.
2. Keep Tracking Simple
Tracking employee goals and incentives can be an inefficient and difficult manual process. Often, employees don’t know where they stand and there is no easy way to reference that information quickly enough to drive behavior and yield results. It is vital that you let employees know what they need to do to both meet — and exceed — expectations and how those achievements translate into incentives. Remember that overcomplicated plans confuse employees and, ultimately, do nothing to help change behavior.
3. Get Actionable Information in Real Time
Waiting weeks or even months to determine if a sent referral has closed or resulted in new business just won’t cut it: it’s crucial for employees to receive instant feedback that lets them know where they stand. Real-time information allows employees and their supervisors to track behavior and instantly readjust so that everyone knows where they need to get to in achieving goals, as well as the incentives associated with those goals. By adopting a system that allows you to track progress in real time, with clear steps to accomplishing goals, you can set your employees — and your institution — up for success.
4. Leverage Automation
Unlike manual systems, where data input can be inconsistent or delayed, an automated system can update information on a daily basis for actionable insight into goals and incentives. By automating the tracking and the creation of reports and providing easy-to-access records for employees and their supervisors, you can provide timely information that actually helps enact behavioral change.
The key to success is empowering your employees with real-time actionable insight into their progress toward individual and organizational goals. The newest breed of CRM solutions has finally made this process manageable: the latest technology can help you build a customized incentive plan, make it easy for your employees to track results, and automate reports so that you can re-adjust right away.